Today we face a climate of ever increasing misdirection by popular media. This site, along with others, aims to reveal the reality of America and the loss of fact inherent to the over riding theme of our current political and social confusion: Purposeful deception.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Why Extinctions Should Worry Us as a Species

You probably missed it on
the news, three weeks ago, the item about the Vietnamese rhinoceros going
extinct; it didn't make a lot of noise. The fact that an animal which had
roamed the jungles of Vietnam
for millions of years had now disappeared from the Earth for ever didn't hit
the front pages, or the television headlines: there were far more pressing
concerns for the world. A rhino in Vietnam? So what? Who's bothered?

But I've been thinking about
it ever since. I find the story gripping. Nobody knew there were any rhinos at
all in Vietnam, or in mainland Indo-China, for that matter, until just over 20
years ago, when hunters shot one in the dense forests of the Cat Tien National
Park about a hundred miles north of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon as was). Imagine.
You suddenly realise your country's got rhinos. You had no idea. It's like
finding wolves surviving in the Scottish Highlands.

It turned out to be a
subspecies of the Javan rhinoceros, itself one of the world's rarest animals,
and its discovery was one of the first elements of what you might call Vietnam's
zoological peace dividend. For nearly 40 years, remember, the country was
continually at war, with the Vietnamese fighting first the Japanese, then the
French, then the Americans, and its tropical forests were off-limits to all but
the combatants; but after hostilities finished, in 1975, the jungles slowly began
to give up their secrets, which included a whole series of large mammals
previously unknown to science.

The Vietnamese rhino was the
first of these; and for more than a decade, it was known only from the skin the
hunters had kept, and then from footprints and droppings. But in 1999, it was
at last photographed in a camera trap, by an automatic pre-positioned camera
which captured an unforgettable image, an image to make you shiver with
excitement, of a monstrous beast crashing through the jungle in the dead of
night.

Zoologists worked out that
the population of the Cat Tien rhinos was very small, probably below 10; and it
was assumed – I certainly assumed it – that no effort would be spared in
safeguarding this wildlife treasure, South-east Asia's rarest animal. But here
we are, a decade on, and the Vietnamese rhinos have gone. All of them. Poachers
had the lot, for the booming market in rhino horn as a component of traditional
Asian medicine.

Genetic analysis of dung
samples has now shown that an animal shot in the park for its horn in April
last year was the last. Millions of years, it had lasted, Rhinoceros sondaicus
annamiticus; and then humans find it, and it's gone in 20. It wasn't easy to
save, and was on the brink of extinction anyway, but the fact remains that
we've snuffed it out.

We are the species that
destroys. Is that not how humanity should be defined? Never mind the possession
of consciousness, and language, and art, we are special in a different way: we
are the only species capable of destroying our own habitat. Yet the more damage
we do, the more plants and birds and mammals we wipe out, the more forests we
cut down and the more seas we pollute, the more we seem to retreat into a
secular, smiley, people-centred creed, and which insists that humans are
basically, fundamentally, good.

Maybe they're not. Ever
considered that? Ever looked at the baleful effect we have on the Earth, and
considered that perhaps there is something deeply wrong with us as a species? Not
to worry. That's not a thought that's allowed any more, now that we've thrown
our gods away, and deified humanity instead. And anyway, it was only a rhino.
In Vietnam,
or somewhere. And who's bothered?

The rare, the beautiful
and the jungle survivors

It will be fascinating to
see what fate awaits the remainder of Vietnam's zoological peace
dividend, the dozen or so new mammals that have turned up in the past 20 years
as researchers have probed the country's jungles. They are led by the saola, a
sort of cross between an antelope and a buffalo with long, backward-sloping
horns and a white-striped, mournful-looking face – it's a beautiful animal –
which inhabits the moist mountain forests of the Annamite mountains.

It was discovered in 1992
and not photographed until 1999. There are only a dozen or so recorded
sightings, most of them of dead animals. There are none in zoos, but a reserve
has been set up. At least three new species of deer have also been found,
notably the giant muntjac, related to our own muntjac which is busy eating the undergrowth
of the woods of southern England;
and a major primate species, the Tonkin
snub-nosed monkey, thought extinct, has been rediscovered, but is also very
rare. Let's wish them luck; if they are to see out the 21st century, they will
need a lot of it.

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